Search engines are an integral part of today's electronic world. A search engine is generally powered by a collection of search indices. A search index may associate keywords or combinations of keywords to particular locations (such as web pages) containing or related to those keywords. In order to generate and maintain these search indices, search engines often use crawlers to find and identify documents and extract information from the documents. A web crawler requests a document (a web page) from the web server and indexes keywords in the document. Web page metadata and heuristics may allow the crawler to recognize the importance or semantic meaning of various aspects of the document.
As the world transitions to more and more content being available through mobile platforms and some content only being available through mobile platforms, search engines increasingly rely on content from applications and not just content from web pages. However, with the wide variety of applications (referred to interchangeably as apps), and the nearly infinite ways in which content can be assembled and presented in these apps, recognizing and interpreting data from apps is very difficult for a search engine. Further, because mobile applications are not readily addressable with URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), as on the World Wide Web, the significant advances made in web crawling technology cannot be directly applied to mobile applications.
The background description provided here is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.